Web searches are still the starting point for most internet users, and while Google still reigns supreme, their share of the US search market has gone down yet again. When the default search engine in Firefox changed from Google to Yahoo there was a visible spike in the usage stats between the two search engines. Now that trend continues where more search traffic is being diverted from Google to Yahoo. This is good news for Microsoft who currently is providing the search results for Yahoo search. Bing’s numbers in the latest count remain flat, but it didn’t lose share to Yahoo, unlike Google, AOL, and Ask.
However the partnership between Bing search and Yahoo seems to be cooling as the Yahoo CEO has said the deal is bad for Yahoo. It will be interesting to see how this complex world of search giants changes in the coming years. Microsoft has been investing lots of engineering hours on improving their Bing results which Yahoo benefits from. Will Yahoo ever break away from using Bing’s results and use their own search algorithms again? For now Google remains in first and has lost another percent of search share to Yahoo.
